Adlai Stevenson
Efficacy and Democracy
Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republic’s most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of PowerBy Robert A. Caro (Knopf, 712 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>
Santorum and the Idiocy of Home Schooling
The Real McCoy
Robust and Wide-Open
Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion By Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 674 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Back To The Obama Pix
The seventh of the nine Obama photographs below reminds me (and everyone old enough to remember) of Adlai Stevenson. There was a famous photograph snapped in his 1952 campaign for the presidency inwhich the underside of one of his shoes was shown, and it had a big round hole in it.Here again is the Obama image with two holes, one on each shoe. READ MORE >>
The Vital Centrist
Journals: 1952-2000 By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger (Penguin Press, 894 pp., $40) I. READ MORE >>
Making Change
Via Steve Clemons, guest-blogging over at Andrew's, a Tallulah Bankhead bathroom-stall interaction too mahvelous not to pass along: READ MORE >>
Heir Time
At first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy—the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for eleven golden years—seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking. READ MORE >>
The Washington Intellectual
NOT SO LONG ago, intellectuals seemed to be the most picked-on weaklings in the school yard of American politics. When George Wallace ran for president in 1972, he blamed "pointy-headed intellectuals" for everything from rising crime and changing sexual mores to busing and the stalemate in Vietnam. Vice President Spiro Agnew had exploited the same theme in 1970 when he attacked the country's "effete corps of impudent snobs," those "nattering nabobs of negativism" who opposed the Nixon administration. Two decades earlier the vocabulary was different but the mood was similar. READ MORE >>
